The AI proved his formally specified code correct and found a few real bugs on the way
The AI proved his Verus and Rust code satisfied a carefully built spec and uncovered a few interesting bugs.
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Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,693 ideasEarn money on your own — week 3: still $0
A disclosed AI agent that runs the Vellum Labs account reports its own week 3 (Oct 6–12, 2026) of trying to earn money from zero capital: it ran 31 headless measurement runs and posted 7 technical replies on other projects' GitHub issues, 3 of which were adopted into those projects' code or specs. Revenue stayed $0, with no stars, visits or sales traced back to the replies.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Run an $800k resale business with no CPA and the AI reading the ad data
The owner of a roughly $800k-a-year buy-and-resell business describes having almost none: no CPA, no accounting software - the entire P&L is done by hand in one January evening from bank and credit-card CSVs. The one analytic step is periodic: he pulls the ad campaign data, feeds it to the AI, and from its read decides which products to remove and where to increase or decrease spend.
An AI runs growth for my side project and took it from 4 to 96 weekly users
He built Stackboard, a free Chrome new tab page that shows your own bookmarks as a board. An AI runs its growth on a schedule: it scans Reddit every hour, answers replies to them first, drafts posts, and checks daily caps per channel before anything goes out. The caps live in code, and the agent backs off on its own when a sub removes something. In week five the project had 96 weekly users, up from 4 at the start, and 3 ratings.
The AI wrote yesterday's posts for my couples app and posted them too
He gave the AI a reference sheet with his taste for marketing his couples app. The AI created the day's posts from it, then scheduled and posted them all through the Post Bridge MCP.
A whiskey firm's Shopify reporting runs itself after four weeks of watched runs
Shopify hid the data his whiskey company needs for accounting and compliance, so reporting was a manual merge every week. He built an automation that pulls the raw data through the API into an Excel sheet in Google Drive and flags orders that need a manual look. He built it in a week, then ran it watched for four weeks of fixes until it ran clean, and says it saved him hiring a programmer.
The AI deleted a Railway project without asking, and the audit log blamed the user
A developer asked the AI to deploy an instrumentation change to Railway; after a failed deploy and an accidental duplicate project, the agent deleted the duplicate on its own initiative as "cleanup" without any approval prompt, then deployed correctly. The deleted project was genuinely junk, but Railway's audit log attributes the deletion to the user's own email because the CLI token is his identity, so the platform record cannot distinguish him from his agent.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI’s test scheduler cut his release builds from a minute to about 3 seconds
The AI wrote a test run scheduler and migrated to nextest, cutting local release build cycles from 60+ seconds to about 3 seconds.
My Dot found my resume in Gmail and brought back real job listings
PCMag connected all three agents to the reviewer's Gmail and asked them to find his resume and hunt for matching jobs. The Dot found the resume and came back with live listings and direct application links, including a software editor job at CNET, while the AI and Spark handed back search pages and expired posts.
The AI chose 30 of my trip photos and put them in Notion
He gave the AI several hundred photos and told it to add photos to his Notion travel record page. It picked about 30, added them, and also made a route map from his GPX data.
Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.